I finished "The Midnight Library". Pretty good, life-affirming. So what's next? I thought maybe "Everything Bad is Good for You" but the beginning would bog us down in details of paper and pencil simulation of baseball. I tried to list 5 or 6 possibilities. I had heard of Barbara Tuchman, a historian (1912-1989) but mostly in connection with her Pulitzer Prize winning "The Guns of August", about the beginning of WWI.
I searched through books we had already purchased that we either haven't read or have forgotten. It was time for a non-fiction so I skipped offering the fiction titles that I thought might be ok to read aloud. I suggested
The Mathematics of Love
Leonard Maltin's 151 Best Movies You've Never Seen
Simplexity: Why Simple Things Get Complicated
Deep History and the Brain
The Political Mind
And A Distant Mirror by Tuchman
Lynn liked the sound of Tuchman and we started it. We only read 3% of the book but she has already written two comments I appreciated. One is that no Pope had ever issued a Papal Bull in support of something. The book was written in 1978 and I just looked up papal bulls (named after the seal of authentication, bulla). I see that bulls have announced the Great Jubilee and the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy so I take Tuchman's assertion with a grain of salt.
Tuchman also made a comment that applies to our lives today. She says that the ordinary and normal don't make for news. What gets recorded and reported is the extraordinary and the frightening and the bad. She estimated that reporting an event multiplies its impact by five or ten times.
